Her plane is worse than most. Its one of the last trijets in production. Planes with a small number of large engines are more efficient than planes with many small engines, which is why modern planes are all twinjets with wide high-bypass engines.
Airlines care about fuel efficiency. A minor reduction in fuel burn results in increased profits, and they operate large fleets. A small increase in efficiency across an entire fleet is huge. If you own a private jet, you are spending huge amounts of money to have one, the cost of fuel would only be a minor concern.
The solution to private jets is regulation. Private jets don’t need to exist. They don’t need to be replaced by another kind of airplane. The solution is to replace all planes on overland routes with electrified rail. Let the rich buy private railcars for transport.
I’m not skeptical on the concept of small aircraft. I wanted to give context because very few people will picture bush planes and puddle jumpers from the mention of “commercial aviation.”
PS: My calculations for fuel burn were based on comparing the range to the fuel capacity. Those are the numbers I have ready access. Planes are much less efficient when the tanks are full, and swift’s plane has a longer range, so it’s probably not quite as bad as my calculations indicate on comparable flights.
Most old systems used two digits for years. The year would go from 99 to 0. Any software doing a date comparison will get a garbage result. If a task needs to be run every 5 minutes, what will the software do if that task was last run 99 years from now? It will not work properly.
Governments and businesses spent lots of money and time patching critical systems to handle the date change. The media made a circus out of it, but when the year rolled over, everything was fine.